I have been working at SSL for two years and two days. And, in two months, I won't be working here any longer - though I'll only be in Berkeley for probably half that time.

Trying to find a place to live in Kelowna - not easy to do from a distance, but I've got some promising leads. I'll be on a road trip from July 21-Aug 5, so I really want to take care of finding an apartment in BC before that. Also hoping I can go to a great ISM Conference in the Okanagan just before my teaching job starts. But if I go to that, the last time I'll see Eric is around July 14, before he leaves for a conference. Then either one or both of us is away from Berkeley for the rest of the summer.

I've run a couple new SETHI cubes, using my blacklist (BL) to exclude bad spectra, as well as not running the median cumulative filter (MCF). I'm mostly interested in redoing the Galactic Plane regions, since they are most severely affected by the MCF. The BL seems to have gotten rid of some streakiness in the cubes too, but these are still pretty noisy compared to the kind of spectra we get from ALFA.

I have been working at SSL for two years and two days. And, in two months, I won't be working here any longer - though I'll only be in Berkeley for probably half that time.

Trying to find a place to live in Kelowna - not easy to do from a distance, but I've got some promising leads. I'll be on a road trip from July 21-Aug 5, so I really want to take care of finding an apartment in BC before that. Also hoping I can go to a great ISM Conference in the Okanagan just before my teaching job starts. But if I go to that, the last time I'll see Eric is around July 14, before he leaves for a conference. Then either one or both of us is away from Berkeley for the rest of the summer.

I've run a couple new SETHI cubes, using my blacklist (BL) to exclude bad spectra, as well as not running the median cumulative filter (MCF). I'm mostly interested in redoing the Galactic Plane regions, since they are most severely affected by the MCF. The BL seems to have gotten rid of some streakiness in the cubes too, but these are still pretty noisy compared to the kind of spectra we get from ALFA.

If you ever do a roadtrip out to Edmonton, Alberta from Kelowna, drop me a line.

This SETI supporter would like to buy you a cold one for all that you do. :)

... but these are still pretty noisy compared to the kind of spectra we get from ALFA.

Any ideas as to why that is?

Quite simply because ALFA is a state of the art receiver, whereas the line feed has inherently less optimal systematics etc. With GALFA we can get the system noise to less than 0.1 K in a few seconds, while for SETHI spectra a typical 13-second spectrum has ~ 2K noise rms, so we need a few hundred of them to bring the noise down to something comparable.

And we don't get a few hundred spectra per pixel that often, except near 18 degrees when the telescope is stowed. Here's an image of sky coverage:

Each pixel represents how many spectra went into the averaging for that position. In this map it ranges from 0 to over 640 (the white pixels which cluster mainly near dec=18). It's a good example of the non-uniform sky coverage which makes the SETHI survey less than ideal. Hopefully Eric and I will submit a paper on it soon, warts and all.